Russias president Vladimir Putin had made several statements over the last six months, voicing his strong and unequivocal support for George W. Bushs reelection bid. First, during his American visit last summer, Putin said that the Democrats had no moral right to criticize the incumbent for the Iraq invasion, after what they did to Serbia in 1999.

Later in Astana Putin said that the Iraq invasion was indeed justified, because Saddam was planning terror attacks against U.S. targets, according to Russian intelligence. Finally, in October Putin said that Kerrys candidacy was supported by international terrorists, waging a war on the United States.

Political pundits on both sides of the Atlantic tend to explain Putins sympathies by a common belief, that the Democrats, should they win this election, will inevitably get involved in Russias internal affairs, as their record suggests. The Democrats were expected to care about YUKOS, Chechnya, human rights and Russian press freedom  all issues that George W. Bush never showed any serious concern for, as long as Russia didnt interfere in his military campaigns overseas.

Without trying to disprove these expectations or discuss their utterly theoretical value, one can find at least ten other reasons that place Vladimir Putin among George W. Bushs supporters, based on demographic data, as reflected in last nights exit polls.

First, Mr. Putin is a white male, which makes him a Bush voter with a probability of 61 percent.

Second, the Putin familys financial situation clearly improved over the last four years. 79 percent of voters who share this view regarding their own families vote for Bush.

Third, Putins annual income clearly exceeds $50,000, and 55 percent of people in this income group are supporting Bush.

Fourth, neither Putin nor his wife, his pet dog or his daughters belong to any sort of union, which makes Putins household likely to support Bush in 55 percent of cases.

Fifth, Putin is employed full-time, and Bush enjoys the support of 52 percent of full time workers.

Sixth, Putin is neither liberal, nor moderate. His reverence to both Soviet and Orthodox Christianity legacies makes him a clear conservative, and 83 percent of all American conservatives vote Bush.

Seventh, Putin is married with children, and 56 percent of voters in this bracket vote Bush.

Eighth, Putin is the acting head of the entire Russian military, and 57 percent of uniformed voters and vets support Bush.

Ninth, Putin isnt gay, nor is he a lesbian or a bisexual. Which means a 52 percent probability of voting for Dubya.

Finally, weve seen and heard Putin preoccupied with the terror problem lately, and 86 percent of those that see terrorism as the most important issue supported George W. Bush in his reelection bid Tuesday.

And if more than 60 pecent of the Russian population, as surveyed in both online and offline polls supported John F. Kerry, this simply means that they dont fall into the same income and age group with their president.

While he's being so candid, maybe he can explain the GPS jammers the Iraqis tried to employ against our JDAMS and come clean about the special forces ferrying munitions to Syria. Always remember where his roots are....the old Soviet bloc and the KGB.

Uh-huh. All those apparatchiks came around and saw the light and the errors of their ways - NOT.

Russia is very much back on its way to being a one-party state, and Putin is cultivating a very Stalinesque cult of personality. And he's using the terrorist attacks against his country as an excuse for further consolidatiing his power.

7
posted on 11/03/2004 5:08:52 PM PST
by inquest
(We have more people patrolling Bosnia's borders than we have patrolling our own borders)

Ummm, the munitions story was another Geortz bag of hot air. Note no one is talking about it now that the 2 day orgy of conspiracies are passed. DoD admitted to using them to blow up 400,000 tons of other munitions. ABC's cameras showed they were still there. The blame the Russians first crowd needs to chill out, they come in 2 brands: Cold War left overs who want their glory and Islamics who don't want a new Glory on their heads.

I about a former hard leftist (Labor), still PC and pro EU unionist Blair? Or a former indited business man Berlusconi? Or a former hard core communist in present day Poland? Which of America's allies' leaders don't have something questionable in their past, to include Bush himself? People change, at least Christianity allows us to see it that way.

If you can't tell the difference between being a high-up member of the most criminal organization in world history, and merely having something "questionable" in one's past, then you're not going to have much success discerning anything.

By the way, in your above post you neglected to come up with an excuse for the other point the poster raised, namely Russia's supplying Saddam with that jamming equipment. The excuse given by Moskow at the time was that our missiles could end up killing civilians. But of course, jamming the missiles' guidance systems greatly increased the risk to civilians.

18
posted on 11/04/2004 7:49:48 AM PST
by inquest
(We have more people patrolling Bosnia's borders than we have patrolling our own borders)

The people that believe we can totally trust the Russian govt are naive, to put it nicely. There's too much corruption in what's left of their shattered military. It's been well documented that a former Russian mafia figure assisted American authorities in the prevention of a nuclear submarine sale. I wont't go as far to say that the operation to spirit munitions (chemical, or otherwise) was an order that came from the top, but the Russians definitely had dealings with Iraq well after the sanctions were in place and leading up to the start of combat. If Gertz said it, you can believe it. He's no Dan Rather.

Putin is an unreformed Communist dictator (and an enemy of the US). He is truly living up (or should I say down) to his KGB pedigree.

September 20, 2004, 8:14 a.m. No Peter the Great Vladimir Putin is in the Andropov mold.

By Ion Mihai Pacepa

Vladimir Putin looks more and more like a heavy-handed imitation of Yuri Andropov  does anyone still remember him? Andropov was that other KGB chairman who rose all the way up to the Kremlin throne, and who was also once my de facto boss. Considering that Putin has inherited upwards of 6,000 suspected strategic nuclear weapons, this is frightening news.

Former KGB officers are now running Russia's government, just as they did during Andropov's reign, and the Kremlin's image  another Andropov specialty  continues to be more important than people's real lives in that still-inscrutable country. The government's recent catastrophic Beslan operation was a reenactment of the effort to "rescue" 2,000 people from Moscow's Dubrovka Theater, where the "new" KGB flooded the hall with fentanyl gas and caused the death of 129 hostages. No wonder Putin ordered Andropov's statue  which had been removed after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991  reinstalled at the Lubyanka.

In the West, if Andropov is remembered at all, it is for his brutal suppression of political dissidence at home and for his role in planning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. By contrast, the leaders of the former Warsaw Pact intelligence community, when I was one of them, looked up to Andropov as the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist party in governing the Soviet Union, and who was the godfather of Russia's new era of deception operations aimed at improving the badly damaged image of Soviet rulers in the West.

In early 2000, President Putin divided Russia into seven "super" districts, each headed by a "presidential representative," and he gave five of these seven new posts to former KGB officers. Soon, his KGB colleagues occupied nearly 50 percent of the top government positions in Moscow. In a brief interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline, Putin admitted that he had stuffed the Kremlin with former KGB officers, but he said it was because he wanted to root out graft. "I have known them for many years and I trust them. It has nothing to do with ideology. It's simply a matter of their professional qualities and personal relationship."

THE NATIONAL POLITICAL PASTIME In reality, it's an old Russian tradition to fill the most important governmental positions with undercover intelligence officers. The czarist Okhrana security service planted its agents everywhere: in the central and local government, and in political parties, labor unions, churches, and newspapers. Until 1913, Pravda itself was edited by one of them, Roman Malinovsky, who rose to become Lenin's deputy for Russia and the chairman of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma.

Andropov Sovietized that Russian tradition and extended its application nationwide. It was something similar to militarizing the government in wartime, but it was accomplished by the KGB. In 1972, when he launched this new offensive, KGB Chairman Andropov told me that this would help eliminate the current plague of theft and bureaucratic chaos and would combat the growing sympathy for American jazz, films, and blue jeans obsessing the younger Soviet generation. Andropov's new undercover officers were secretly remunerated with tax-free salary supplements and job promotions. In exchange, Andropov explained, they would secretly have to obey "our" military regulations, practice "our" military discipline and carry out "our" tasks, if they wanted to keep their jobs. Of course, the KGB had long been using diplomatic cover slots for its officers assigned abroad, but Andropov's new approach was designed to influence the Soviet Union itself.

The lines separating the leadership of the country from the intelligence apparatus had blurred in the Soviet satellites as well. After I was granted political asylum in the United States in July 1978, the Western media reported that my defection had unleashed the greatest political purge in the history of Communist Romania. Ceausescu had demoted politburo members, fired one-third of his cabinet, and replaced ambassadors. All were undercover intelligence officers whose military documents and pay vouchers I had regularly signed off on.

THE MAKING OF A DICTATOR General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the Soviet gauleiter of Romania who rose to head the Soviet foreign intelligence service for an unprecedented 15 years, used to predict to me that KGB Chairman Andropov would soon have the whole Soviet bloc in his vest pocket, and that he would surely end up in the Kremlin. Andropov would have to wait ten years until Brezhnev died, but on November 12, 1982, he did take up the country's reins. Once settled in the Kremlin, Andropov surrounded himself with KGB officers, who immediately went on a propaganda offensive to introduce him to the West as a "moderate" Communist and a sensitive, warm, Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an occasional drink of Scotch, liked to read English novels, and loved listening to American jazz and the music of Beethoven. In actual fact, Andropov did not drink, as he was already terminally ill from a kidney disorder, and the rest of the portrayal was equally false.

In 1999, when Putin became prime minister, he also surrounded himself with KGB officers, who began describing him as a "Europeanized" leader  capitalizing, ironically, on the fact that he had been a KGB spy abroad. Yet Putin's only foreign experience had been in East Germany, on Moscow's side of the Berlin Wall. Soon after that I visited the Stasi headquarters in Leipzig and Dresden to see where Putin had spent his "Europeanizing" years. Local representatives of the Gauck Commission  a special post-Communism German panel researching the Stasi files  said that the "Soviet-German 'friendship house'" Putin headed for six years was actually a KGB front with operational offices at the Leipzig and Dresden Stasi headquarters. Putin's real task was to recruit East German engineers as KGB agents and send them to the West to steal American technologies.

I visited those offices and found that they looked just like the offices of my own midlevel case officers in regional Securitate directorates in Romania. Yet Moscow claims Putin had held an important job in East Germany and was decorated by the East German government. The Gauck Commission confirmed that Putin was decorated in 1988 "for his KGB work in the East German cities of Dresden and Leipzig." According to the West German magazine Der Spiegel, he received a bronze medal from the East German Stasi as a "typical representative of second-rank agents." There, in those prison-like buildings, cut off even from real East German life by Stasi guards with machine guns and police dogs, Lieutenant Colonel Putin could not possibly have become the modern-day, Western-oriented Peter the Great that the Kremlin's propaganda machine is so energetically spinning.

Indeed, on December 20, 1999, Russia's newly appointed prime minister visited the Lubyanka to deliver a speech on this "memorable day," commemorating Lenin's founding of the first Soviet political police, the Cheka. "Several years ago we fell prey to the illusion that we have no enemies," Putin told a meeting of top security officials. "We have paid dearly for this. Russia has its own national interests, and we have to defend them." The following day, December 21, 1999, another "memorable day" in Soviet history  Stalin's 120th birthday  Putin organized a closed-door reception in his Kremlin office reported as being for the politicians who had won seats in the Duma. There he raised a glass to good old Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin, meaning "man of steel," was the dictator's nom de guerre).

Days later, in a 14-page article entitled "Russia on the Threshold of a New Millennium," Putin defined Russia's new "democratic" future: "The state must be where and as needed; freedom must be where and as required." The Chechens' effort to regain their independence was mere "terrorism," and he pledged to eradicate it: "We'll get them anywhere  if we find terrorists sitting in the outhouse, then we will piss on them there. The matter is settled." It is not.

SCAPEGOATING AND CONSOLIDATING On September 9, 2004, Chechen nationalists announced a $20 million prize on the head of the "war criminal" Vladimir Putin, whom they accuse of "murdering hundreds of thousands of peaceful civilians on the territory of Chechnya, including tens of thousands of children."

For his part, President Putin tried to divert the outrage over the horrific Breslan catastrophe away from his KGB colleagues who had caused it, and to direct public anger toward the KGB's archenemy, the U.S. Citing meetings of mid-level U.S. officials with Chechen leaders, Putin accused Washington of having a double standard when dealing with terrorism. "Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?" Putin told reporters in Moscow.

Then Putin blamed the collapse of the Soviet Union for what he called a "full scale" terrorist war against Russia and started taking Soviet-style steps to strengthen the Kremlin's power. On September 13, he announced measures to eliminate the election of the country's governors, who should now be appointed by the Kremlin, and to allow only "certified" people  that is, former KGB officers  to run for the parliament.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, its people had a unique opportunity to cast out their political police, a peculiarly Russian instrument of power that has for centuries isolated their country from the real world and in the end left them ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of modern society. Unfortunately, up until then most Russians had never owned property, had never experienced a free-market economy, and had never made decisions for themselves. Under Communism they were taught to despise Western democracy and everything they believed to be connected with capitalism, e.g., free enterprise, decision-making, hard work, risk-taking, and social inequality. Moreover, the Russians had also had minimal experience with real political parties, since their country has been a police state since the 16th century. To them, it seemed easier to continue the tradition of the political police state than to take the risk of starting everything anew.

But the times have changed dramatically. My native country, which borders Russia, is a good example. At first, Romania's post-Communism rulers, for whom managing the country with the help of the political police was the only form of government they had ever known, bent over backwards to preserve the KGB-created Securitate, a criminal organization that became the symbol of Communist tyranny in the West. Article 27 of Romania's 1990 law for organizing the new intelligence services stated that only former Securitate officers "who have been found guilty of crimes against fundamental human rights and against freedom" could not be employed in the "new" intelligence services. In other words, only Ceausescu would not have been eligible for employment there. Today, Romania still has the same president as in 1990, but his country is now a member of NATO and is helping the U.S. to rid the world of Cold War-style dictators and the terrorism they generated.

Russia can also break with its Communist past and join our fight against despots and terrorists. We can help them do it, but first we should have a clear understanding of what is now going on behind the veil of secrecy that still surrounds the Kremlin.

 Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former two-star general, is the highest-ranking intelligence officer to have defected from the Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.

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